Increasing Business Growth From ‘Incremental’ To ‘Exponential’

We have a problem. Over 85% of business owners or leaders will say they want to grow or accelerate their business. The majority will target (and be quite satisfied with) a three to eight percent increase over the previous year’s results. Typically this is incremental growth built on year over year results, and updated assumptions. Built from the bottom up. Sound familiar?

In today’s economy if you aren’t growing or changing your business, you are almost certainly losing ground to others. In fact, we’ve started to view incremental business growth as a bare minimum just to stay in the game. “Even an idling car when put into gear will move forward.”

Take Your Business Growth To A Higher Level

You can design and grow your business to whatever level you wish. Seriously.

“Building your business is like building a puzzle – and, you get to decide on the size, shape and image of the puzzle.”

So let’s reverse the incremental ‘build-from-the-bottom” approach to growth by instead starting with your desired end-result: create a substantial growth target for your business 3 years from now. Think big – say 3 or 4 times growth. Now by setting your new growth target as “fixed”, what has to change within your business to achieve that new growth target for your business: Value proposition or offerings? Business model or marketing approach? More/Different product lines or services? Geographic expansion? Organic growth versus business development?

Every piece in your puzzle will be unique and essential to your business growth.

An interesting phenomenon occurs when we start by thinking destination or “end result” – our thinking becomes ‘strategic’ rather than ‘transactional’. What you begin to realize is that incremental growth is typically ‘transactional’ (essentially just doing more of the same), whereas exponential growth is typically ‘strategic’ (expanding or changing HOW we do things or WHAT we do).

“There is a 100% chance that your business could be performing better than it is right now.”

Exponential (strategic) growth is achievable for every business. It requires:

1. Starting with an ambitious destination (the puzzle you want to build); 2. Understanding what is mission-critical to reach the destination (essential pieces of the puzzle); 3. Disciplined and sustained action (systematic build of the puzzle); and, 4. A sense of urgency and deadline (otherwise the puzzle will never get built!).

The higher you aim, the better the outcome. Interested in seeing what this approach could do for YOUR business growth? Register for our next two-hour Peer-to-Peer Business Owner Roundtable on ‘Simple, Practical Business Execution’.

About Our Blog

Based on our extensive work with clients, Doug’s Unlimited is happy to share our practical experience and learnings through regular articles on a variety of topics. Subject matter is selected from ongoing observations or challenges commonly encountered by clients which are generally pertinent to all businesses.

If there is a particular topic or issue you would like us to address in a future article, we would be happy to hear from you. While we will do our best, we may not be able to accommodate every request. We hope the articles offer practical discussion and helpful advice to you and your business.

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About Doug’s Unlimited

Doug’s Unlimited empowers owners to unlock business potential with a simple, practical online platform that has been proven to substantially improve strategy and business execution, literally in hours.

Whether growing, improving, transitioning, passing down or selling your business, the Success Dashboard Execution Platform provides an online structure to help owners create a succinct destination for their business, quantify everything ‘mission-critical’ needed to get there, and ensure laser-focused action on the highest-impact areas to achieve their goal.